Monthly Archives: March 2020

Love in. Love out. Love in. Love out.

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I carry it with me.

No matter where I go. No matter what I do. What I’m thinking, saying, hearing, feeling. I carry it with me. And it carries me. Through. Into. With. Of. Everything I do and say, think and hear and feel.

My breath.

In. Out. In. Out.

In these crazy, uncertain times, my breath carries me.

It sustains me. It nourishes me. It keeps me alive.

I feel so helpless in the face of the news. I feel so scared. There is so little I can do, but whatever I do, I must ensure it sustains, protects and nourishes me, everyone in my world and all the world around me.

And so I breathe.

In. Out. In. Out.

As I breathe in, I imagine love all around me. It flows into my body with my in-breath. It courses through my arteries. Is carried into every vein, every molecule, every cell every fibre of my being.

I breathe out. I imagine the love that fills me up, rippling out into every molecule of my exhale.

I imagine love flowing out. Flowing out into the world around me, filling every molecule, every cell, every breath of air around me.

Love in. Love out.

It may not stop a virus from attempting to slip in undetected, but it does calm my heart, ease my mind and bring me peace.

And with peace of mind and heart, I am better able to cope with fear, uncertainty, anxiety.

With peace and love rippling through my body, I am present in the here and now without fear stealing away the moment.

Love in. Love out.

Love in. Love out.

And so I breathe.

 

I hear you mum. I know. I will not forget.

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On my desk stands a photo of my daughters, sisters, grandson, mother and me. It was taken at the time of mum’s 96th birthday in August 2018. My eldest sister had it mounted on a block of wood and gave it to mum. It graced the desk at the end of her bed, beside her TV. She looked at it every day as French CBC played on the screen and she sat in her wheelchair and watched and listened to life beyond her room. She prayed for each of us in the photo and often placed a finger she’d kissed against her great-grandson’s face.

As I sit at my desk and watch the river flow in the ever-widening channel it carves through the ice and the sun slowly tints the sky rose and pink and periwinkle blue, I feel the presence of that photo. It graces my desk now. It holds memory. It tells a story. Of the past. Of the future.

Tears well up in my eyes. Not because I miss my mother, or wish she were here right now to tell me what to do or how to handle challenges and obstacles on my path. She wasn’t that kind of mother.

My mother was the magnet that brought us all together. She was the one who drew my daughter home to Calgary from Vancouver and my sister from her home in the Gulf Islands. She was the one whose significant birthdays we celebrated as a family whenever possible. Her dancing girls and grand-daughters. Her grandson who gave her the courage, when he was born, to remember the joy of having a son without the pain of his loss over-shadowing her memories.

This photo is her story of life, its threads woven through the warp and weave of her journey. It is full of the threads she held in her crooked, misshapen fingers and sometimes used to lovingly place kisses on the faces of those she loved. It is surrounded by photos of her mother, father, brothers, sisters, her children, grand-daughters and her grandson.

These photos crowded the walls of her room. Every day she would look at them, say prayers for the departed and those still here. There was little room for a new story to be told on the walls of her room when her time ran out. Yet, the story told in this photo will continue.

It will weave its way into being without my mother’s hands guiding and drawing the story-makers together. It will unfold without my mother’s fingers reaching out, as she does with her grandson in this photo, to link the generations together.

And that is why I cry. A link to the past has broken. There is only the future to foretell. A future where my mother’s hands do not reach across the distance to draw us all together for one more photo of all of us standing around her. Her dancing girls and granddaughters, her great-grandson and her soon to be born, great-granddaughter.

We are now the link. We are now the gatherers. The ones who must draw together the weave and warp of our tapestry to create rich and vibrant hues and stories that will unfold in time.

We are the history-keepers, the story-makers, the tellers of the past, the architects of the future.

I feel the absence of my mother in the photo this morning. She was the one who brought us all together. In her absence, I see the photo that will be taken this summer when my granddaughter is born and a photo is taken of her when she is three months old. Just as my grandson is in this photo.

And I hear my mother’s voice telling me as she so often did when I was younger, in the times before I became a mother and held in disdain her love of family and her desire to gather us all together, “One day you will understand and you will know what family means. I pray you never forget.”

I hear you mum. I know. I will not forget.

Covid 19 – I’m keeping my distance.

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Even after baking fresh bread. After making a big batch of mushroom soup and a beef stew. Even after packing up my paints and brushes, my papers and ephemera, I decided not to go.

I was going off to a week-long artist’s retreat in the foothills of the Rockies today.

Yesterday, I called and said I wasn’t coming.

My beloved has a cold. He also has a chronic medical condition. He’s in the high-risk group.

But that’s not really why I cancelled.

I cancelled because I did not want to worry. I did not want to fear inadvertently bringing disease into our home.

I cancelled because I love him.

I made the decision after I saw that Alberta’s number of cases had doubled yesterday. Yes, they are all travel-related but, one of the others at the retreat will be going back and forth to the airport a couple of times for work while I’m there. I do not want to lay the burden of my worry on my friend. And, if you look at the statistics from around the world, this virus exponentially increases on a daily basis. Travel is its gateway. Airports one of its conduits.

It wasn’t an easy decision. I love being at this retreat centre. Savour time spent in the foothills, surrounded by nature’s wild beauty. And I particularly like creating with these friends.

But I couldn’t do it.

To dive deep into my creative essence I need to let go of ‘worldly’ concerns, of worry, of anything but creative expression.

I couldn’t do that when no matter how deep I breathe into the moment, I know my beloved is sick and I am not doing everything I can to protect his health.

So, I decided to practice ‘social distancing’. I hadn’t heard the term before my eldest daughter sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic, Coronavirus: Cancel Everything. In it, the case for social distancing is clearly laid out. In the data, it’s also hard to argue with the fact that to stem Covid 19’s spread, we must change our behaviours.

Yesterday, I scrolled through many articles on Covid 19 and how to prepare for its inevitable presence in the community.

I was looking for reasons why it was okay for me to go.

There were many.

None of them out-weighed my responsibility to the one I love. My responsibility to do the right thing in these difficult and challenging times to create better for everyone. A week ago, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. I would have gone.

In just one week, the sinister reality of Covid 19’s presence has darkened the globe and the lives of 14 people here in Alberta, 7 of whom were reported on yesterday. It’s impact cannot be ignored.

This isn’t because the media have created fear and paranoia. They are simply reporting the facts — Covid 19 is killing people and there are things we can do to mitigate against its impact. Media are also not the ones telling people to hoard toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Human nature’s doing that.

I’m doing what I can.

Sure, it’s possible that my response is over the top for the situation right now. It’s possible it is predicated upon the recent passing of my mother and death’s heavy cloak of sorrow clouding my vision.

That is all possible, but none of it outweighs the reality of Covid 19’s lethal capacity to take life.

If I can do anything to stop it from hurting the ones I love, I must.

It doesn’t mean I won’t be creating. I have a beautiful studio at home. It’s french doors open out to the trees lining the river which I can watch flow from where I sit at my work table. It has a fireplace and all the supplies I need to create. It also offers peace of mind. And when it comes to creating, peace of mind is the foundation of my expression.

So, for the next few days I shall be ‘pretending’ to be on an artist’s retreat. I’ll go for long walks (Beaumont will be very grateful as he is not allowed at the retreat centre). I’ll make lemon tea with honey. Share my fresh bread and mushroom soup and other meals with my beloved.

It will be a different experience than I had anticipated and I’m good with that. Different doesn’t make it ‘not as good as’. Different means it will include the one I love and share my life with. It means having the peace of mind of knowing I am expressing my love for him the best way I know how. By taking care.

I am grateful.

Nothing Is Too Heavy For Love.

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There are many names for it.

I call it fear.

Fear of being exposed. Seen. Known. Fear of diving deep into what lies beneath the surface of the words skimming the page. Fear of falling into the darkness and losing the light.

I feel this fear. It stalks me like a wolf slipping through the trees. Camouflaged by nature. Eyes peering out of the shadows. It follows my steps. Waiting.

I keep walking.

I do not want to stop and look for it. I want to pretend it’s not there. Not stalking me. Not waiting. I want to pretend it does not exist.

I am better than this, I tell myself.

And fear laughs. It knows better.

I want to turn around, go back, rewind time.

I want to rid my body of this urge to write, to tell the stories damning my arteries. I want to free myself from these chains.

“It’s not fear,” the voice inside my head, the one that loves me in all ways, even in my brokenness. quietly whispers. “It’s grief.”

I shrug my shoulders. dismissive. Angry. I step on a dried leaf lying on the forest floor. The crackling of its spindly spine breaking rustles in the silence.

Grief?

I want to laugh. To pretend I didn’t hear the voice. I want to run deeper into the forest where the peering eyes cannot see me. I want to become a tree.  Silent. Rooted in nothing but soil and dirt.

I want to be invisible.

I can’t move.

“The river is struggling to flow free of unwritten words,” the voice whispers.

“I can’t,” I tell the voice.

“You know better.”

And I do. Know better. And I know nothing at all about this thing called grief.

“Grief is a river,” the voice whispers. Is it the trees? Is it the hawk skimming the water’s surface?

Is it the wolf?

I want to block my ears. Shut off my mind.

I open my mouth, “Damn that river.”

“You have,” the voice replies. There is no rancour in its words. no condemnation. Only patience. And love.

“It’s been a week,” I hiss.  “I’m done with this.”

“Life is never done with you. Even after your death, life carries your spirit,” the voice lovingly replies. “It is carrying your mother now.”

I sink down onto my knees. The forest floor is damp. Musty.

I gather a bunch of dead leaves in my hands. I raise them up. A priestess extending an offering to the forest goddess. To the Great Mother.

A ray of sunlight splinters through the foliage above. I release the gathered leaves from my hands. Dust motes shimmer and dance where the light finds them drifting effortlessly to the ground.

Bowed beneath the weight of that which I cannot express, I press my forehead to the earth and breathe into the darkness of its mysteries, its beauty, its light, its life and its dying nature.

“I’m tired,” I whisper to the Great Mother of this earth upon which I kneel.

“Let me carry you,” she replies.

“I’m too heavy.” The words come out as a sigh. A plaintive whisper escaping on a breath of air.

“Nothing is too heavy for Love,” the Great Mother replies.

A ghostly breath of air, soft as a feather, brushes against my skin. The leaves rustle.

I rise up from where I kneel on the forest floor.

I turn and peer into the darkness of the trees around me. I spy the wolf’s eyes watching me.

“I see you,” I say. I take a breath. “I come in peace and in grief. I come in sorrow and in fear. No matter what I carry with me, I come in Love.”

The wolf blinks his great yellow eyes and slowly lowers himself to the forest floor. I watch his eyes close. He falls effortlessly into slumber.

Life whispers through the leaves of the trees moving in the gentle breeze that stirs their branches.

Life lays silently beneath my feet where fallen leaves decay.

Life is here. So is fear. Sorrow. Decay. Grief. Joy. Gratitude. Grace.

And always, Love.

I carry on through the forest. The wolf slumbers. The trees fall silent.

The Great Mother carries my weight with loving care. The earth holds me up.

Namaste.

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Thank you DS for your call. Your words of love and encouragement. Your beauty and honesty.

I Am Woman.

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No. 35 #ShePersisted Series
They said women are the weaker sex.
She kept giving birth to all humanity,
and with every child born unto man,
they witnessed the power of her strength.

I am woman.

I have borne the pains of birthing humankind so that we may all know life. I have forged my strength in the fires of the womb nurturing the unborn and tended to my compassion in the crucible of the pelvic bowl holding the sacred seeds of life.

I have climbed the manmade mountains designed to keep me in my place and risen above the fear of falling to my knees beneath the crushing weight of man’s desire to own me.

I have been forced to bow beneath the blows of patriarchy forcing me to kneel at its altars.

I have lived beneath the crushing death of believing I am not strong enough, good enough, do not do enough, and will never be enough because I am not a man. I am not his equal.

No more.

I have been forced to hide my feminine aspects and don the robes of conformity to not make those who feared my strength and my beauty feel ill at ease in my presence. I have been forced to witness the desecration of my sisterhood throughout the dark ages of our humanity where women’s voices were silenced and women’s work became the fodder for genocide, colonialization, subjugation and patriarchy.

No more.

I am woman.

I am the fertile womb conceiving life on this planet throughout time. I am the strength of all my grandmother’s grandmothers who bore life before me.

I am woman.

Midwife to the fires of creation, birthed from the womb of the Great Mother who bears us all, I have suckled at her breast and suckled others at mine.

I nurture life into being. I tend to the fires of our humanity.

I am woman.

I am a gatherer. I am a creator. I am the vessel through which all men are born. I am the milk that sustains us. The crucible that holds our humanity safe.

I wear my feminine aspects like a star-studded cloak shimmering in the light of a new moon rising.

I am woman.

I have risen. I am rising.

I shall always rise.

I am woman.

Is this grief?

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Mum throughout the decades

Thoughts collide with one another in my head. I want to write them out. I don’t know how. I don’t know what they are. I just don’t know.

Is this grief?

Is this what happens after the one who brought you into the world dies?

I wrote to someone this morning that the one thing I didn’t want to do while giving my mother’s eulogy was to cry in front of everyone. I wanted to honour her in ways I couldn’t in real life.

My mother’s relationship and mine was very complex. It wasn’t that we fought. It’s just we couldn’t agree on how to live life in peace.

I wanted to talk everything out. My mother wanted me to just ‘let things go’.

I can’t let go of what I do not understand, I’d tell her. I cannot let go of what is not named.

You just want to make trouble, she’d tell me. Let the past lie in silence.

Growing up I wanted her to be the mother of television shows. You know, the one who had fresh baked cookies waiting for you when you came home from school. The one who gave really good advice even when it related to boys — my mother’s advice tended to extend to practicalities like, ‘keep your legs crossed and definitely don’t let boys touch you…. there’, ‘always wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident’ and ‘don’t sit on cold concrete. you’ll get hemorrhoids’.

I wanted a martini toting, laughing and giggling, outrageous, belle of the ball kind of mum.

She wanted an obedient, dutiful, listen to me kind of daughter.

I was none of those.

Years ago, when my daughters were about five and six, I knew I had to do something to heal my relationship with my mother. So, after much deliberation, I went to visit my parents to ask my mother to tell me her life story.

She was eager to do so. When we sat down, I turned on my dictaphone (remember those?) and she began to speak. “I was born in Pondicherry, India.” And she began to cry.

My father, not one for tears, kept walking into the room and telling her to stop crying.

I kept offering her kleenex.

She ignored us both and kept telling her story. For two and a half hours.

At the end, I understood better.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love me, or want me to be happy, or want a relationship with me, (which were some of the things I told myself, and my therapist, were the problems in our relationship.) It was just, she wanted the world to be for me like it was for her, or at least as she remembered it, when she was growing up in Pondicherry, India.

She called it her Shangri-la. She had God. Family. Friends and a beautiful way of life.

She wanted the same for me and my siblings. Being the rebel whose nickname growing up was, The Brat, I didn’t want what she had. Especially her faith, which I told her was a patriarchal construct designed to keep men in power and women subservient. (I know. It was the mean feminist in me. The one who didn’t understand way back then the power of words and the need for kindness.)

Without God as my ballast, my mother was terrified for me. Scared that I would get hurt in that great big scary world over which she had no control. Scared I would lose myself, and without surrendering to God’s will, my will would lead me into temptation, trials and tribulations.

It wasn’t until I was working on the powerpoint for her celebration of life and the eulogy that I realized that my mother and I weren’t that different. We might have used different words, but we both want/wanted the same thing. Peace. Love. and Harmony.

Once upon a time I wanted my mother to be the mother I wanted.

I am so grateful she was the mother she was. She taught me the value of kindness and helped me grow into the woman I am today.

My mother believed. Deeply. She believed that God would never forsake her. That God would lead the way.

Because of her deep faith, I always knew I was never alone in this Universe.

Because she never lost faith in God, I learned to never lose faith in myself. I learned that kindness is the ripple that creates a better world, act by act.

And above all, I learned that it’s not words that transform the past and relationships and the world. It’s Love.

 

 

 

 

 

Cheerio Kid

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It is Tuesday morning. The day of our mother’s celebration of life.

I am sitting at my desk, working on finishing touches to the powerpoint of her life. I had been struggling with the second song to go with the photos. My brother-in-law had asked that I ensure we use Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, which my sisters and I all agreed was perfect. I didn’t want to play it twice (the presentation was 4 and a half minutes long) but ‘the song’ hadn’t come to me.

Until 5 am that morning when I heard a voice whisper in my head, “What about Esther and Abi Ofarim’s version of In the Morning?”

Thanks mum!

I got up and began working on finding a version I could download and include.

Around 8, when my sister, Anne, got up, I played it for her.

Immediately, tears started to flow and she agreed. It was perfect. We had sung and danced to that song when living in Europe and later, whenever my daughters were with us at my eldest sister’s home for dinner, we would play it and we’d all dance and we’d tell stories of our ‘growing up years’.

We were not dancing this morning. But my sister and I were moved by the song and its capacity to transport us back through time.

And that’s when the magic happened.

As Anne is listening, eyes closed, tears streaming down her face, I looked out the window in front of my desk and saw him.

The Coyote.

I’m pretty sure he’s the same one I wrote about on January 30th, my youngest daughter’s birthday. This time, he doesn’t just glance up and move off, he stands at the fence that separates our yard from the riverbank and watches me closely.

It is as if he too is listening intently.

My sister and I watch. He watches back.  A long time.

And then, he turns and walks slowly away.

It’s then that we see her. She is waiting slightly upriver. Hidden in the trees. His companion. His partner. His soulmate.

My sister and I watch the two coyotes lope off through the trees together.

We are both crying.

In the big tin box I have of mum’s keepsakes, the box Anne and I have been going through for photos for the powerpoint, there is a stack of letters and poetry dad wrote to her during WWII after they were married. In his missives, he often called her ‘kid’ or signed off with, “Cheerio, kid.” He also promised that, no matter what, he would be coming back to India for her. And in 1945 after the war ended, he did. Come back for her.

I wonder now if that lone coyote was also a sign. Our mother was growing tired. The signs were there. She was becoming more and more weary of this life on the earthly plane. Dad was waiting for her.

During the war, our mother waited patiently to be reunited with her beloved Louis. He died almost 25 years before her and she believed with her heart of hearts that they would one day be united.

On Tuesday morning, two coyotes loped off through the forest that lines the river in front of our home. One stands hidden in the trees, waiting patiently. The other comes and stands outside my window. He is listening and watching. And, when he turns to go I hear a voice say,  “Cheerio kids. “I’ve got her. She’s safe.”

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